Apple vs HTC: proxy fight over Android could last years

Apple's lawsuits against HTC could be the start of a multi-year legal battle, …

Apple came out swinging Tuesday against smartphone maker HTC, filing a federal lawsuit and a complaint with the International Trade Commission, both alleging that HTC's phones violated numerous Apple patents. Some believe the suits are the beginning of a protracted legal battle against Google's Android OS, and analysis of the patents in question suggest Apple's two-pronged approach may be successful, though HTC says it's ready to fight back with its own patents and with Google in its corner.

The best analysis we have seen of the patents themselves comes from Engadget's Nilay Patel who, in a previous life, was an IP attorney. Patel notes that the older patents are more directly related to operating systems and only one could be said to apply to HTC's Windows Mobile devices while the rest are directed at Android. The patents referenced in the federal lawsuit are newer and have yet to be tested in court. Still, Patel believes that at least some of the claims of the various patents seem legitimate on the surface.

Needham & Company analyst Charles Wolf also thinks Apple's chances are good, and believes Apple is doing the right thing by filing the suits. "Apple invested heavily and imaginatively in designing a unique, disruptive smartphone," Wolf wrote. "In our view, the company has every right to protect the iPhone's unique features."

The strategy is also likely to merely start with HTC, with Apple eventually going after other Android-based phone vendors as proxies to combat Android. "It clearly involves some form of litigation strategy of picking off the weaker members of the herd first," Jonathan Zittrain, a professor at Harvard Law School, told The New York Times. "They can always add Google to the suit later on."

For its part, HTC isn't planning on going down easily. The company said that it had been building mobile devices for 13 years in a filing with the Taiwan Stock Exchange. "So HTC is not only a mobile technology innovator, [we] also hold a large number of patents," according to the filing.

Google won't sit idly by while its hardware partners are sued by Apple, either. "We are not a party to this lawsuit," a Google spokesperson told TechCrunch. "However, we stand behind our Android operating system and the partners who have helped us to develop it."

It's hard to say how the whole thing will play out. Patent cases often take several years to go through the courts, though Apple has a large enough war chest to settle in for the long haul. Experts say that 90 to 95 percent of such cases are often settled out of court.

Still, not everyone is convinced that Apple's strategy is a wise one, and many are concerned this battle is another example that the US patent system—especially where software patents are concerned—is fundamentally broken. "The social value of patents was supposed to be to encourage innovation—that's what society gets out of it," MIT professor of technology innovation Eri Von Hipple told the Times. "The net effect is that they decrease innovation, and in the end, the public loses out."

Apple typically uses patents as a defense against lawsuits from others, so the fact that it has gone on the offensive against Android suggests that the problem may have a connection with the growing competition between Apple and Google. It may also explain Steve Jobs' rather brusque comments yesterday. "We can sit by and watch competitors steal our patented inventions, or we can do something about it. We've decided to do something about it," Jobs said in a statement.